


Royal, Flush (The High Stakes Hold-Em Treatment)

by Nope



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-16
Updated: 2011-04-16
Packaged: 2017-10-18 04:55:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/185259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nope/pseuds/Nope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five decisions made.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Royal, Flush (The High Stakes Hold-Em Treatment)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [biichan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/biichan/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Royal Treatment](https://archiveofourown.org/works/111576) by [biichan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/biichan/pseuds/biichan). 



TEN

She has been queen for seven days. Seven days since her father finally succumbed to the heat delirium. Seven days since he killed his doctors, ran ranting and screaming through the citadel, knives swinging, blood everywhere, corpses in his wake already bloating under the blazing, unblinking eye of the terrible sun. Seven days--

She has always been an expert marksman.

And so now she is the queen. There was a ceremony and everything, heavy gold pressed into the darkness of her curls, solemn hands on her. Ancient words on her lips, shaping carefully learned phonemes in that long dead language once laughingly called English.

"I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong."

She spent it thinking of old stories. Mysterious strangers who show up in their hour of greatest need, lonely tricksters with terrible hair and alien intelligence and a box containing everything, even hope. She's thinking of it now, in the Situation Room, while the children weep in the arid streets and even here her skin cracks and peels. Seven days a queen and somewhere up in space a whale is crying and here is their sin and their salvation, all in one neat package. Everyone is looking to her, and whom does she have to look to? No one, of course. She is the highest authority.

Elizabeth the Tenth makes her decision.

 

 

JACK

Ten years, she's been queen; ten, in this world-city, on this state-ship. There's a man -- a boy, really. Such a lovely smile. Eyes that dazzle and hide so much. She finds him staring at a glass of Old Janx Spirit and when she draws her guns, he looks right up at her and says, "I like a lady who can handle weapons," a line so terrible she can't help but be charmed by it.

He lies as easily as breathing, his hands as clever as his mouth and really, it's not like there are laws against bedding commoners, not now, not really. Her ministers, her winders, those people who keep the works moving disapprove. She can see it in the tightness of their lips, in the darkness of their eyes. She revels in it. They're keeping secrets from her? She'll flaunt her truths, her indiscretions, her liaisons with strange men with no past and impossible futures; she'll encourage him to seek out what she can not, and when he does, when he does--!

"It's a test," he tells her, the last time she sees him. "A test they give to all the new recruits to the Time Agency. You can't win. You're not supposed to. That's the test. The lesson. Some things can't be changed -- and I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Because you already know that. You'll know it every time you come to this place."

He's standing at a screen. There are two buttons. His hand rests on FORGET.

 

 

QUEEN

There are freshly repaired scratches in the floor. There's the tiniest fragment of curved black plastic from -- she doesn't know. Some impossible crash. The window is perfectly untouched. Perhaps her Winders are more thorough than she knows. They're certainly more solicitous today than normal, watching as if she were an invalid who might relapse. It's infuriating. It's creepy. There are nine glasses of water arranged before her in a semi-circle, like a down-turned smile. The water is still. She shivers.

Nitro-nine, she thinks, and finds nothing to connect the thought to.

When she returns to her chambers, a girl is there. A woman, really -- perhaps twenty years younger than she, so newly reigning, so far from home that was. The woman's wearing a jumpsuit and a black wristband, and there's something soft and hard about her, all at once; the woman's eyes so sad, so knowing.

"How did you get in here?" she demands, hand already reaching into her cloak, reaching for the guns she carries always now, one at each hip, slung from her belt like her perfect porcelain mask.

The woman is there somehow, right there, beside her, lips brushing against her cheek, whispering, "It's all there in a glass of water."

The woman smells of ... something, something almost familiar. She wants suddenly to run her hands though that hair, to turn her head and kiss, but there's a flash, everything wiped away in a burst of ozone, and she is, once more, as ever, as always, alone.

 

 

KING

The Doctor and his companion slip away, as she has known they would, just as the stories tell. The whale beats on against the solar tides. The truth twists with the telling, leaving her still monarch, not monster, for all that she has abdicated. She orders the treatments stopped but what they'd done was mostly irreversible. Age touches her only gently. She outlives them all, ministers, Winders, Smilers and children. She goes to Mandy's wedding, to the christenings of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, to funerals. So many funerals.

More and more now, she retires to her collection. Ancient relics of bygone days. How well she fits, here. She tries not to feel it. She knows she's done nothing to earn allowance for moments of self-pity. It's hard to apologise for your actions when no one else cares. They live their lives. They're born. They die. The whale goes on. She goes on. All just stories in the end.

"I put on my mask, cloak and guns," she tells River over drinks, the two of them naked and entwined on a red silk bed that once belonged to George the Sixth, "and I pretended to be the person I wanted to be -- the person I thought I was, until the tower, each time, and the message, and the button. How do you learn? How do you know who you are, if you don't remember?"

"You remember now," River says, smiling. "The real question is, what are you going to do about it?"

 

 

ACE

She's ten parsecs out of Draconia, loitering in a dingy bar on a fourth-rate space liner, casually eavesdropping on some low-life smugglers, when the bartender places a glass of water in front of her. She stares at it, watching the light break across the rippling surface, and then looks up, arching an eyebrow in question.

"We've met before, you know," says the woman in the jumpsuit with the wristband and the sunglasses, soft and hard all at once.

"I'm sorry I don't remember," she says, smiling, letting her hand drop to her gun. Diamonds clink when she moves, a bag full, freshly expropriated from men who exploit the desperate poor for profit and ready to be turned into medicines and food. It doesn't make up for anything, but it lets her sleep and smile, and that's enough. The woman just smiles.

She starts to say something else, but the roar of rockets drowns it out as the smugglers' ships all at once rip themselves free from docking clamps and spiral out past the windows to crash spectacularly into each other, exploding in silent twisting fire.

"As it happens," the woman says, "I happen to know a thing or two about vigilante justice myself." The woman grins. It makes her look years younger, bright and brilliant. "Want to get out of here?"

The smugglers are roaring and fighting. Local law enforcement sirens are blaring. People are scattering in every direction. The woman is holding out her hand.

Liz makes her decision.


End file.
